I’ve tried looking closely at the various photographs of wiring that appear in the forum, but I’m still unclear about one critical step. I’ve got feeders of 20AWG stranded wire not more than eight inches long. I’ve got 12AWG solid wire for my track bus. I want to use terminal blocks in connecting the feeders and bus. (The feeders generally will not all reach the bus anyhow.)
Wanting to shop locally, I was limited in options for what I gather is the obvious solution–but tell me if I’m wrong about that. I bought terminal blocks that will handle 22 to 10AWG, and 16AWG primary wire, and spade terminals that will handle 16-14AWG. I plan to run the feeders to the blocks and connect (via solder or IDC) the 16ga wire to the bus at one end and to the blocks at the other.
I’d appreciate knowing if this is logical, correct, efficient, and so on. If you can point me to videos that show this or similar ways to do this, I’d appreciate it; usually I just see a nice neat set of terminal blocks with wires attached. I’m assuming you don’t twist and turn the bus so as to come with reach of feeders. I’m also assuming that I need to use a bit heavier gauge between feeder and bus, as I’m planning. Anything else I’m overlooking? Thanks.
They run out like fingers the length of this 18’ bench from the terminal block at this end. I connect my last feeders to the end of the Bus wires at the far end. I have four Bus lines for the mains, one under each track and another down the centre for the yard.
For connecting the feeders to the Bus, I simply strip the wire on the 12 Gauge Bus (about an inch wide) and wrap the feeder around it, solder it and then a quick brush on of liquid insulator. I do this every six feet or so.
If I understand what you are saying, that sort of defeats the purpose of the bus. The bus is to get the power as close to the rails as possible and then just “jump” with the feeders from bus to rail. Unless you are talking about parallel tracks or multiple tracks running close to the terminal block the feeders are getting longer and longer.
The bus should come directly into the terminal block. You are using the 16 gauge wire to “extend” the track feeders to the terminal blocks?
I think that is a wrong assumption. The bus is supposed to follow the track fairly closely so yes it is coming within easy reach of the feeders. I took a really nice picture of this and unfortunately seem to have misplaced it. I’ll look on my other computer tonight.
Depends on how far away the feeders/blocks are going to be.
As noted, the whole point of having a bus of larger gauge wire is to provide a low-resistance path to the various parts of the layout. Once you start adding excessive length, higher-resistance (smaller gauge) feeders, you’re defeating the purpose of the bus wiring.
Do it right, and have the bus follow the track. If the track branches off, so should the bus.
If you don’t, you’ll be back here later wondering why your trains run poorly and your short-circuit protection isn’t working…
Your idea and method will work but it really depends on how far apart your feeders are ploaced. WEhen NTRAK changed its standard to 12 ga bus most of the existing modules had 16 ga bus wires with track feeders attached to it. Those that already had enough feeders (2 pairs min. per 4 foot module) were upgraded by simply soldering the old 16 ga bus to the new 12 ga bus. This limited the 16 ga to a maximum of four feet. The results are excellent. For a fixed home layout feeders could be spaced further apart. we built in some redundancy when we developed the NTRAK standard.
